BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

INTRODUCTION:Business Intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, analyzing and presenting the right business data to right people at right time for making business decisions. In single line, BI makes possible to convert Data into Information. BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics. Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is often used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence, is done by gathering, analyzing and disseminating information with or without support from technology and applications, and focuses on all-source information and data (unstructured or structured), mostly external to, but also internal to a company, to support decision making. Business intelligence tends to be an esoteric function because it is an entangled process that calls for employees with specialized knowledge and skill both in business and technology, a combination in short supply in most organizations. Analysts must understand what viewers are interested in and how business is run, but they must also have the technical skills to formulate complex queries, design intuitive reports, optimize retrieval, and so on. Such a small group of BI specialists can evolve into isolated elitism, a bottleneck in maximizing the functionalities of BI.

HISTORY:In a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn used the term business intelligence. He defined intelligence as: "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal." In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed BI as an umbrella term to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems." It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.

Business intelligence and data warehousing:Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.

Business intelligence and business analytics:Thomas Davenport has argued that business intelligence should be divided into querying, reporting, OLAP, an "alerts" tool, and business analytics.

Getting Business Intelligence projects prioritized:It is often difficult to provide a positive business case for Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives and often the projects will need to be prioritized through strategic initiatives. Here are some hints to increase the benefits for a BI project. As described by Kimball you must determine the tangible benefits such as eliminated cost of producing legacy reports. Enforce access to data for the entire organization. In this way even a small benefit, such as a few minutes saved, will make a difference when it is multiplied by the number of employees in the entire organization.

Critical Success Factors of Business Intelligence Implementation:Although there could be many factors that could affect the implementation process of a BI system, research by 'Naveen K. Vodapalli' shows that the following are the critical success factors for business intelligence implementation: a. Business-driven methodology & project management b. Clear vision & planning c. Committed management support & sponsorship d. Data management & quality e. Mapping solutions to user requirements f. Performance considerations of the BI system g. Robust & expandable framework

BUSINESS INTELLIGNECE TOOLS:Business intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to report, analyze and present data. The tools generally read data that have been previously stored, often, though not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart.

Types of business intelligence tools:The key general categories of business intelligence tools are:

Spreadsheets Reporting and querying software - are tools that extract, sort, summarize, and present selected data

OLAP Digital Dashboards Data mining Decision engineering Process mining Business performance management Local information systems

Except for spreadsheets, these tools are sold as standalone tools, suites of tools, components of ERP systems, or as components of software targeted to a specific industry. The tools are sometimes packaged into data warehouse appliances. IDC continues to evaluate the BI tools market in the context of what has been identified as a 15-year market cycle that began in 2005. Historical analysis suggests that most markets experience a typical s-curve pattern. This pattern begins with early modest growth, which is followed by accelerated growth and then a mature period with a slowdown in growth, and it ends with a decline until a new market cycle resumes. The BI tools market is currently in its third s-curve market cycle and is only in the third year of the current cycle. Therefore, IDC expects acceleration in the BI tools market starting in 2009.
4

The Top 5 Business Intelligence Tool Vendors According to IDC:1- Business Objects:Business Objects continues its reign as the leading BI tools vendor. In 2006, the companys software revenue in this market reached $894 million. In 2006, Business Objects experienced a slight slowdown in its BI tools license revenue growth. After gaining half a percentage point in share in 2005, the company gave it up in 2006. However, the latest information on the uptake of its Business Objects XI platform suggests a pickup in growth in the latter part of 2006 and early 2007. Business Objects is also making an aggressive push into the midmarket, where it targets organizations with less than $1 billion in revenue. The companys partner network is one of its strongest assets, and this effort, which depends in large part on indirect sales, is expected to contribute to the growth of Business Objects BI tools. 2 SAS:SAS was again the second-largest BI tools vendor, with $679 million in software revenue and a continued steady increase in market share to 11%. SAS had the highest growth rate among the top 3 BI tools vendors and the third-highest growth rate among the top 10 vendors. SAS still derives more revenue from its advanced analytics tools, but its effort to revamp and more aggressively market its QRA tools since 2004 has paid off, with QRAs share of SAS total BI tools revenue increasing from 37% in 2004 to 44% in 2006. As the leader in the advanced analytics market, SAS holds 31% of that market segment.

3 Cognos:Cognos maintained the third position in the BI tools market, with $622 million in software revenue and a 10% growth rate in 2006. It is also one of only three vendors with at least a 10% share in the BI tools market. Cognos has pursued a two-pronged strategy of developing and marketing BI tools and financial performance management applications, with recent expansion into
5

other

related

performance

management

markets such as workforce analytics. Nevertheless, BI tools remain Cognos largest product line. In 2006, Cognos released several enhancements to its core BI platform.

4 Microsoft:Microsoft had another strong year in the BI tools market, with the highest growth rate (28%) among the top 10 vendors. IDCs revenue allocation for Microsoft in this market differs somewhat from other vendors in that its BI tools revenue is not only made up of standalone software that the company acquired with its 2006 purchase of

ProClarity Software but also includes what IDC calls embedded BI tools that are bundled with Microsoft SQL Server. These database-embedded tools include SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services. As part of its broader business analytics offerings, Microsoft also includes SQL
Server. Microsoft Excel, SQL Server

Integration Services within

Its other related tools that the company positions within the business with specific Excel 2007 features for BI, and be

analytics stack include

Performance Point Server, a set of performance management applications to released in the second half of 2007.

Microsofts growth in the BI tools market can be attributed to focused sales and marketing efforts in recent years, accompanied by both internal R&D and

acquisitions. While, in the past, Microsoft considered BI to be functionality that helps to sell databases and enhance its partners more extensive BI capabilities, the company has since identified BI as a market worth pursuing directly.

5 Hyperion:Hyperion maintained its fifth position in the market, with a 5.2% market share and a 12.3% growth rate. Since releasing its latest BI platform, which incorporates the best of the Hyperion and former Brio components (in addition to certain new performance enhancements), the company has improved its standing in the BI tools market. Hyperions other major product line includes financial performance and strategy

management applications, where company has been the market leader for years.

THE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CYCLE:-

The Four Linked Components:

A healthy BI strategy should be viewed as the sum of four major processes that fit together in a constant cycle. These four processes are measure, analyze, plan and improve.

Figure 1: Business Intelligence Improvement Cycle

Measure:

The measure phase is by far the most widely deployed and far-reaching process of business intelligence. Think of the process of establishing a BIIC as blowing up a long thin balloon. As you blow up the balloon, the part of the balloon closest to your mouth expands first, then that expansion extends down the length of the balloon. If you wrote
7

the words measure, analyze, plan and improve down the length of the balloon starting at the end you blow into, the measure section of the balloon would expand before you will see the other sections. Try to blow up any section of the balloon before the measure section and you will find it impossible. The same goes for the BIIC.

In the measure phase, companies "report" the current and historical status of key metrics used to manage their business. These measures tell a company the "what" (i.e., "What is the status or health of my business?"). Although most companies know which fundamental indicators to measure (e.g., sales, profit, etc.), it is not necessarily easy for them to obtain and distribute the status of these measures to the individuals throughout their organization. By employing an effective BI solution, an organization can successfully distribute this information to all the people who affect business inside and outside the enterprise. Through BI, an organization can uncover new ratios and metrics that provide even deeper insight and that could potentially modify or enhance that which is currently measured. Today, reporting and information delivery software used widely by IT departments provides the bulk of the aforementioned functionality in this initial phase of the BIIC.

During implementation of the measure stage, a stabilization of the company's overall BI infrastructure occurs. People viewing measures can determine inconsistencies with the aggregated measures and what is generally expected. This helps to uncover "glitches" in the collection processes. Determining problems with data collection and connecting them is a necessary evolution that takes place during the measurement stage. Without this weeding out of collection problems, companies cannot successfully move into the latter stages of the cycle because to base analysis and planning on a suspect measurement system makes no sense.

Analyze:

The second phase in the BIIC is analyzed. During this phase, analysts review and measure the data in new and different ways to see whether they can uncover hidden relationships that will help them answer "why" (i.e., "Why is this occurring?"). In the evolution of BI, several tools have emerged that simplify the analytical process - ad hoc query, online analytical processing (OLAP) and data visualization. It is not in the scope
8

of this column to discuss the benefits of each; simply understand that these tools help people analyze data.

Plan:

After determining some of the reasons "why" things occur in the analyze phase, companies then try to determine the effects on outcomes should they implement changes. This is when the third part of the cycle, the plan phase, begins. In this phase, companies use tools to play "what if" games with their data (i.e., varying scenarios that target the process changes they may need to make to help steer the company in the right direction). Software for this segment of the BIIC has been categorized as planning, budgeting and forecasting. Using these kinds of tools, you can perform scenarios such as "expected measures from the budgeting process" and then combine them with historical measures and forecasting algorithms to determine potential future outcomes. You can then vary your inputs to see how different courses of action might affect these outcomes.

The plan phase logically progresses into the fourth stage of the BIIC called improve, or the "how" phase. In this stage, key players within the company discuss outcomes and potential solutions to the problems they have uncovered in the previous stages and then make decisions regarding how to improve them, such as what they can do to positively affect their bottom line. This is where collaboration as part of BI becomes crucial. During review, individuals can annotate and comment on reports and analysis that have resulted from the other stages or even vote on a course of action. Collaboration functionality within BI simplifies and documents this whole process so that each comment, vote or opinion can be weighed in the final decision. As a result of the improve phase, new areas or dimensions of measure may be added to the upcoming "measure" phase in order to track the progress of decisions made during the previous cycle. In this way, a company's BIIC is a process of perpetual improvement that keeps inching the company toward perfection. Once the cycle begins, it is hard to stop it and, moreover, once you see its effect, you'll wonder how you could have lived without it. For example, during the plan phase management may determine that based on expected operating expenses profits will be down in the next quarter. Using
9

planning software, they can determine how much more they would need to sell to realize the same profits as last quarter. Or, they may try to see how an increase in price for certain items would affect their bottom line if the same number of items were sold. A planning application enables a company to determine what steps they will need to take to keep the company on a strategic course toward meeting its goals.

Improve: The plan phase logically progresses into the fourth stage of the BIIC called improve, or the "how" phase. In this stage, key players within the company discuss outcomes and potential solutions to the problems they have uncovered in the previous stages and then make decisions regarding how to improve them, such as what they can do to positively affect their bottom line. This is where collaboration as part of BI becomes crucial. During review, individuals can annotate and comment on reports and analysis that have resulted from the other stages or even vote on a course of action. Collaboration functionality within BI simplifies and documents this whole process so that each comment, vote or opinion can be weighed in the final decision. As a result of the improve phase, new areas or dimensions of measure may be added to the upcoming "measure" phase in order to track the progress of decisions made during the previous cycle. In this way, a company's BIIC is a process of perpetual improvement that keeps inching the company toward perfection. Once the cycle begins, it is hard to stop it and, moreover, once you see its effect, you'll wonder how you could have lived without it.

10

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF HAVING BI SYSTEM?

Some of the benefits of having a Business Intelligence system include the ability to access data in a common format from multiple sources, a way to measure goals and analyze cross-departmental data, to see who your organizations good and bad customers are, and to track customer behavior in order to improve services and relationships. This software can also help to track specific product sales and distributors to improve supply and production, as well as track external trends to improve processes, track market trends to improve an organizations competitiveness, and fine tune pricing and marketing policies. Some issues still need consideration, though increased efficiency and extraction of clear information from complex data can improve and reduce the need for data analyst and improve revenues, determine the exact return on an organizations investment in Business Intelligence systems can be difficult. It can take a while to see the real world benefits of Business Intelligence software and executives can easily label the venture as a failure when results are not immediate. Though the demand for Business Intelligence tools is growing at a rapid pace there is still criticism from the marketplace that the programs are to complex and difficult to use. User resistance will be one of the biggest hurdles for suppliers of Business Intelligence providers to overcome. Another potential problem is the Business Intelligence tools themselves. The applications may be more user friendly than they used to be, the core use of Business Intelligence is still reporting data rather than process management, though that is slowly starting to change. Business Intelligence users must careful not to mistake business intelligence with business analytics.

11

IS BI WORTH THE CHALLENGE?

In the end, simplifying and gathering data from multiple sources in an organization enables users to rely upon the informational memory to help with the decision-making process and problem solving strategies to better understand the customers and market behavior. It may take patience and cooperation from both ends, meaning the data analysts and the IT specialists, to accomplish the desired outcome and benefit from Business Intelligence tools. This can be achieved through comprehensive training on how to use and interpret the information provided by the applications. Business Intelligence is now a day getting spread out in many industries like 1. Banking/Insurance 2. Manufacturing (Refinery/Chemical/petrochemical/Paper & Pulp) 3. Pharmaceutical 4. Automobile 5. Telecommunication

1. Banking on business intelligence:Those who want to survive and thrive have to move fast to keep up with customer demands, changing regulations and the risks of everyday business. Business units and IT departments in the financial services sector are striving to meet these demands and balance them with increasing costs, tighter budgets and controlled risk, but success is possible for companies that can make sense of the vast quantities of data at their disposal. As an increasing number of financial institutions are finding out, business intelligence and data warehousing solutions are providing valuable insight into a host of hidden information treasures. But how can organizations ensure theyre getting bang for their BI buck? FST spoke to three industry insiders to find out.
12

How can business intelligence (BI) technologies help financial institutions manage risk, detect fraud, leverage customer insights and gain visibility into their profitability?

In general, BI technologies are already widely employed in these areas. However, the quality of the resultant reports is often limited by a lack of access to detailed, high volume data. The new trend towards high-performance data warehouse appliances that can handle huge quantities of raw transaction data is starting to alleviate these problems. For those who understand how to leverage BI welcome to a whole new world, where the traditional constraints of costs and architectural limitations in BI have been eliminated. Thanks to open source, BI is becoming standards-based and far more cost-effective, and now the only barrier to successful application of these technologies is the organizations ability to execute on BI projects. Now a large portion of the dollars they used to spend on software licenses can be used to bring in external consultants with deep, vertical BI expertise to teach companies where and why to apply BI technologies. Companies that are successful in maximizing opportunities and mitigating risk have changed their management approach. They have adopted business intelligence and performance management solutions and tools that enable them to be proactive in identifying issues, in making decisions, in executing on them and in evaluating their impact.

13

Even though there has been success with BI in the financial services industry, it has been primarily at the departmental or line-of-business level. What potential is there for enterprise-wide BI deployments within the financial services industry? And what benefits could this bring?
BI has traditionally been a departmental initiative. However like in many other industries, financial services companies are faced with the challenge of keeping up with the growing number of decisions that have to be made on a daily basis. The complexity of corporate decision-making stems from the paradox between data volume and the human ability to act on it. Data keeps growing at an alarming rate, but the capabilities of the average worker to process the information inherent in the data havent changed. Todays BI solutions enable decision-makers to target specific issues they know about or ones they discover along the way. However the key here is to garner that knowledge without spending precious time sifting through mounds of data. We believe that this is best accomplished if the critical information a decision-maker needs is proactively delivered to him, allowing that person to spend time translating it into knowledge. By using that knowledge, people will know what worked and what didnt, so theyll be better prepared to decide and act in the future. Organizations need BI on an enterprise-wide scale so that every employee has the information they need about operations, customers, financial targets, and more to be fully effective in their job. But even as many organizations have had success at the departmental level with BI, recent research shows that cost remains the number one barrier for many organizations considering enterprise-wide BI deployments. The old BI vendors created departmental technologies with departmental pricing models, and they just dont fit any more not for enterprise-wide deployment. Have you ever talked to one of the big BI vendors about an extranet deployment? And they explain their per user pricing model, and the extranet up charge and the add-on administration licenses? Clearly, theres a big gap between customer needs and traditional BI vendor solutions. Pentaho is here to fill that gap, and finally make superior BI technology available at a fraction of the cost compared to legacy offerings.

14

What are the practical issues involved in integrating BI into the existing application infrastructures of financial institutions? How are these being addressed?
Generally, BI technologies have done a good job at integrating with source systems, as well as portals, to the point that both are expected in any BI offering. What hasnt gotten enough attention is business process integration, which is more complex, but also more valuable than data or portal integration. BI was historically an after the fact application, used at the end of the month or the quarter to review historical data to understand operational efficiency, customer trends and sales productivity. But today, organizations are increasingly looking to make BI a part of the day-to-day, operational business processes, and this requires a different technology approach. Complex, inflexible metadata layers and persistent OLAP cubes create fundamental barriers to effective process integration. Pentaho provides the only BI platform that was built from the ground up around business processes, with an embedded process engine, to make it easy and cost-effective to deliver BI within an organizations operational business processes. That means BI delivers value at the point of work for front-line employees, not down the road for a small group of analysts. Some of the practical issues of integrating BI into a companys existing information infrastructure include data security and the ability to set permissions on data usage. Security of data is first and foremost with financial services institutions. Todays solutions such as those from Panorama not only secure delivery of data, but can lock that data down to the cell level. We also provide sophisticated permission settings on data access to ensure that users can only view and analyze information that is relevant to their needs, even though this data could come from a much larger report or source used by many decision-makers at varying levels. Many large financial services companies have tried to implement new BI applications on top of an existing data warehouse infrastructure that is typically already over-loaded. Adding large volumes of raw transaction data to an existing data warehouse can bring the system to its knees and jeopardize the performance of existing applications.
15

Data warehouse appliance technology can help alleviate this problem by allowing companies to divide and conquer the problem. In a typical scenario, an existing large-scale data warehouse can be front-ended by an appliance that stores tens of terabytes of detailed data. Fraud detection and risk management applications can be run directly against this data. In addition, rolled up summaries can be generated on the appliance and fed into the existing enterprise data warehouse. This approach has two benefits: it provides a high-performance sandbox for the new applications, and also reduces the load on the existing environment.

What best practices should companies in the financial services sector employ when choosing and deploying a BI solution? How can this help with measuring the success of a BI implementation?
It sounds simple, but it all comes back to the business requirements. Organizations should select and deploy no less and no more than they need to address their requirements. Instead of letting a vendor tell you that BI success fundamentally depends on the deployment of a dozen different modules and capabilities that happen to exactly match whats on their price list, decide what your business users need and focus on that. Deliver successes early and often. This usually means in smaller increments, or at the very least, starting small from a deployment perspective. Beyond that, the nature of software evaluations has changed in light of the widespread acceptance of open source technology. For the first time, financial services organizations can go beyond RFP responses and demos and actually test and use software before they spend any money on licenses. They dont have to wait until after the sale when the consultant shows up to understand what the software really does and doesnt do. Its so much less risky than the traditional demo, proof-of-concept, and seven-figure-contract model.

16

The BI and data warehouse markets are in the midst of a major period of innovation and disruption. In BI, the traditional standalone vendors are being attacked by database vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle. In data warehousing, incumbents such as Teradata and IBM are being disrupted by new, appliance-based technologies. As a result, yesterdays best practices may no longer be the most appropriate. Financial services companies should approach this rapidly changing situation with an open mind to ensure that they take advantage of the new products that are now available before their competitors beat them to it. The one issue we hear the most from companies we work with is around performance. As more companies look to provide BI applications to their employees, and even inside customer-facing applications, high performance and availability are crucial. BI calculations, especially those within the financial services industry can be complex. Doing analysis, generating different views of information and sharing information with others requires systems that can scale and provide rapid response times. We recommend that companies run performance benchmarks when evaluating a BI system to determine which system is best for the companys needs and infrastructure.

2. Manufacturing Industry on Business Intelligence:With increasing competition and ever more demanding customers, manufacturing is never easy. Agile enterprise is always one step ahead of the competition, which cultivates a responsive environment and delivers major improvements in lead time, product quality, and lower production costs. They adopt Business Intelligence (BI) Reporting & Analytics software as part of their strategic approach to attaining their goals. They are streamlining the information flow both across the organization and through the tiers of the supply chain to reduce cycle and manufacturing times and adapt quickly to market changes.

17

Business Intelligence (BI) helps companies in the manufacturing industry:

Increase the value of customer relationships Respond quickly to changing markets and company sensitivities Accelerate new product time-to-market Reduce inventory investment Improve planning, scheduling, and the procurement schedule Maintain and develop quality assurance Select and apply world-class technologies Optimizing financial performance requires managers to have an in depth understanding

of how products and customers consume resources and this is why manufacturers are adopting more sophisticated cost and profitability analytics - solutions that go beyond production and include the supply chain, support functions and infrastructure. With a robust and reliable understanding of costs and profitability and their sensitivity to changes in demand, managers are able to make informed and incisive decisions about strategy and tactics. For certain manufacturers, where the product or the delivery method is tailored for the individual customer, it may be appropriate to use profitability analytics at the micro-level by individual customer or individual transaction. 1KEY Business Intelligence (BI) helps manufacturers give them better visibility of their financial performance and the insight and understanding to improve it. These include solutions for cost and profitability analytics and for operational planning and budgeting. Being able to quickly assess the impact of internal and external changes, 1KEY BI helps such companies become more agile and better able to keep the bottom line on track. With increasing competition and ever more demanding customers, manufacturing is never easy. Use of BI can significantly improve both the performance and power of manufacturing reporting.

18

Reports generated in high data volume environments normally take a long time to run. To speed up report generation, many systems use tools that employ a summarization technique to reduce the amount of records by aggregating records together with common characteristics. Problem with this technique includes inherent inflexibility and inability to cope with the constantly changing information needs of manufacturing.

BI helps companies in the manufacturing industry:

Increase the value of customer relationships Respond quickly to changing markets and company sensitivities Accelerate new product time-to-market Reduce inventory investment Improve planning, scheduling, and the procurement schedule Maintain and develop quality assurance Select and apply world-class technologies

BI can be used to increase the flexibility and speed of operational reporting:

Quickly generate established reports Easily create ad-hoc reports Isolate specific problems Analyze data across multiple systems Integrate new data sources BI helps manufacturers give them better visibility of their financial performance and the insight and understanding to improve it. These include solutions for cost and profitability analytics and solutions for operational planning and budgeting. Being able to quickly assess the impact of internal and external changes, BI helps such companies become more agile and better able to keep the bottom line on track.

19

TEN MISTAKE TO AVOID IN A BI DELIVERY:-

Behind every success or failure are people. People are the only differentiators. Every data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) project, whether successful or not, teaches us something. It is generally on failures that we base our new success. Having said that, its not always necessary that you fail to learn; you can also learn from others failures, 10 of which are discussed here.

Mistake #1: A non-BI background project manager managing the end-to-end delivery of a BI initiative.
BI project management requires different techniques and methods to succeed. The breakthrough in work process and methodology that form the foundation of data warehouse delivery include such concepts as iterations and phased delivery, and from a non-data warehouse perspective it's hard to appreciate how truly revolutionary and critical these concepts are for successful BI delivery. A project manager who drives the complete BI initiative from end-to-end has to at least be educated on the basics of DW and BI to be able to deliver the BI project successfully. No matter how successful an individual maybe or how much expertise he/she has in managing nondata warehousing projects, he/she will never be able to deliver the DW projects successfully if he/she does not understand the phased delivery approach of data warehouse. Most often it becomes very challenging to convince a non-DW project manager that the analysis and design phases in DW projects go side by side and not one after the other like in traditional project delivery. If this important aspect is ignored, then the schedule and budget are going to get hit, as one always encounters changing requirements in DW projects, whether he/she likes it or not. Additionally, the fallout would be arguments and politics rather than focusing on technical solutions. Every project delivery requires a methodology, which a project manager uses to deliver the project successfully. A project manager who by definition plans, controls and reviews all
20

project activities must understand that a data warehousing project delivery cannot use the traditional waterfall methodology. The data warehouse methodology must take into account the fact that the delivery of BI projects happens in iterations. The success of data warehousing projects is in its phased approach. A project manager who is not knowledgeable about BI is not able to make appropriate staffing selections for his team. The team also suffers due to lack of guidance from the leadership role as much as the goal of the BI initiative would suffer because of the management.

Mistake#2: Being in a pleasing mode with the clients rather than concentrating on feasibility and value-add from the BI project.
The client sponsoring the DW project and end users have to accept the solution which is being built by the implementation team; there is no doubt about this fact. At the end of the day, the solution being built has to be liked and should demonstrate value-add to the clients. The time and effort spent on a particular initiative should demonstrate value for money. But a word of caution. In this process, the implementation team, which is most often a service provider company offering offshore support as well, should not get into the pleasing mode with the clients and users. It might not be practically possible to implement the clients entire wish list. This should be communicated in a strong but polite way. The requirements driving the DW initiative should be validated very critically so that the best solution can be built. What cannot be done should be communicated as clearly as you communicate what can be done. Clients will definitely appreciate and welcome this kind of assessment in the initial stages of a project rather than giving explanations on architecture and infrastructure just before production or in use or acceptance testing when its too late.

21

Mistake #3: Assuming service provider companies own everything about the successful delivery of the project.
This is yet another critical factor for a successful BI delivery. A service provider who has signed a contract to put the BI project into production definitely has ownership on the delivery. That being said, the delivery cannot be a success without active participation from the client and end users having in each stage and phase of the entire lifecycle. Service providers are specialized consultants who can give you options and best practices, much like a professional home decorator consultant. Because its your home, you will have to give the consultant your input and exact specifications. If this does not happen, then the decorator will decorate the home according to his assumptions of your likes and dislikes, which you may or may not approve of. And if this happens at the last minute, then not only will you end up paying for the work that has already been done, but you will also invest more time and money on rework. Without active and adequate client involvement at every phase, no BI delivery can ever have an assured success.

Mistake #4: Bringing in a solution architect halfway into the project and assuming that he/she is going to magically fulfill all the deficiencies .
This is the most common scenario one sees in most of the BI projects. When things are not happening the way they should, the management thinks the immediate remedy is to get a solution architect. What one has to understand is that a solution architect cannot just walk in and wield a magic wand to set things right. The solution architects experience will determine how soon he/she can start delivering the value-adds. Also, the time at which you bring in the solution architect is a driving factor for success. Often when it comes to BI architecture, business users are from Mars and IT people are from Venus. To get them to a common platform is in itself a premium skill for a solution architect. Every BI delivery must have a solution architect with expertise and wide skills in DW and BI. This is vital, as they bring a wealth of knowledge from reference architectures and similar implementations with them. This ready-recon eventually reduces the cost and time to implement technology solutions.
22

The best time to start their involvement is from the analysis stage itself. If not then, do it at least before you spend a large amount of time exploring technology options and assessing the appropriate solutions. Carefully set expectations of the value a solution architect would deliver. If you decide to engage a solution architect when your data model is near completion and expect the architect to do magic to make a performance-tuned and efficient design, it might be over expecting, as things would have already crossed certain stages involving a good amount of time and cost. At that stage, again the issue resolution becomes more political than technical.

Mistake #5: Lack of the right people with the right skills evaluating BI tools for the implementation.
When a new BI tool is being evaluated, a big crowd of stakeholders is often involved in the evaluation. This might include people who are directly or indirectly associated with the BI initiative for which the tool is being evaluated. If a formal process is not followed, it might lead to various arguments and different loops without ever closing the evaluation. Each individual will come up with their own comments and wishes, and this will lead to a laundry list of features expected from the tool. Any BI tool is just a medium helping to deliver a definitive functionality. But what makes the initiative a success is the right people selecting right kind of tool to deliver the right functionality. Key people evaluating the BI tool should clearly understand that each BI tool is pretty much designed for some kind of defined and specific purpose. No tool as such is good or bad. Its the decision-makers, not the tools themselves that make an implementation a success. Imagine if a director whose area of expertise his whole career has been in infrastructure domain is given the authority to make the decision on an analytic tool. You guessed right It would be a disaster. The BI tool evaluation team must include a combination of the BI team, BI solution architect, users and the procurement team. Input from the team should be considered and analyzed to a specified extent to avoid analysis paralysis on the evaluation. If the right people keep their expectations straight, the evaluation process should be relatively smooth. The
23

important factor to consider while evaluating is what exactly the problem statement is. Answer questions like: Is the tool expected to cater to a multiterabyte data warehouse, or its less than a terabyte? This will be a big driving factor as your choice of tools will be dependent on this. You dont need that comes at a premium price to be catering a <1TB data warehouse. In a similar way, it might be totally inappropriate to evaluate a master data management (MDM) tool when your first data warehouse is still being built.

Mistake #6: Business users driving the data modeling.

This could be one of the biggest mistakes which can cause the complete BI initiative to fail. The data model is the heart of the data warehouse, which will determine all other aspects such as performance, easy reporting, scalability etc. There is no doubt that active participation of business users in doing data modeling is required, but the modeling should be done by data modelers who specialize in data modeling and dimensional modeling. Business users have to define and explore the links and dependencies between various business areas or subject areas. Business users have complete ownership of understanding the data. With this knowledge and taking input data, modelers have to define the most appropriate way of placing each measure and dimension of the subject areas in a star schema or a customized schema, whichever is appropriate for that environment. In this exercise, data modelers have to take the ownership of designing the schema and be very careful in defining things even if that means being hard sometimes. They have to be careful of a situation which I once faced. A business user was pestering me to define a data field called premium in investment banking as a dimension. This field was holding currency data. It took two full days for me to explain and convince the user why that field would not qualify as dimension and should be actually a measure. By getting influenced by business users, data modelers easily fall into a pleasing mode. Then they are most likely to deviate from the modeling rules, which down the line, will lead to lot of rework and remodeling.

24

Mistake #7: Counting on your vendor to deliver all that they represented in the presentation.
Avoid overdependence on vendors claims about their product and its performance. Everyone wants to be the best when they are making a presentation about their products. The value and performance of the products always look promising; they just might be. But one must be careful to do ones own homework about the product rather than just blindly accepting vendor presentations and claims. The key here is that tools are not the only critical success factors for a successful data warehouse. There may be instances where the capabilities being evaluated from the tool are not available in the current release; however, the vendor might showcase that theyre been planned in the next release. Making decisions based on these kinds of assumptions is very risky for the simple reason that you are building a thorough dependency on the delivery of a separate entity over which you have no control. In making a decision about a tool on which you are spending a fortune, collect references from the vendor and network with them to see how the product has been doing in a similar environment. You should leverage references where work has already been completed. Apart from the references, it might also be worthwhile to consider the analysis of those products done by research firms like Gartner and Forrester.

Mistake #8: Assuming data quality can be managed somehow.

As we speak about the maturity of the data warehouse today, there is still a lot to be explored and learned about the severity of the data quality problem. Assuming data quality can somehow be taken care of might lead to lot of inconsistencies in the downstream systems. The quality of the data has to be checked and cleansed at the source or at least before it enters the data warehouse. It is inappropriate to do any quality checks in the data warehouse itself. Companies depend heavily on information to make decisions regarding profits, effective operation and customer satisfaction. Inaccuracy and inconsistency in the data will hinder the companys ability to perform competitively. An effective data quality program is almost a must in these maturing systems. It would allow companies to analyze better and make more meaningful decisions.

25

Mistake #9: Over dependency on contractors and ignoring the need to build BI capabilities in house.
Hiring contractors for specialty skills has benefited data warehouse delivery within organizations. However, contractors may benefit specific projects, but not on an ongoing basis. If there is over dependency on the contractors who come in, do good work and leave upon delivery, they not only take their deep knowledge with them but also are not available for any clarifications and fixes if a need arises. Dont treat contractors as employees. You should draw a very clear line for what contractors can help with and what stays internal. Contractors can very easily be caught up in office politics. This is even truer if your contractors are coming from a specific software vendor. It is practically not possible for them to be unbiased about their products. This is where a knowledgeable in-house person with BI skills is able to evaluate and advise the clients if anything is derailing or if the technology is just not fit for their environment.

Mistake #10: Assuming you are done once the data warehouse project is in production.
As the nature of data warehouse is change and becoming more and more productive with iterations, so is the delivery. Once the project is in production, you have just completed a phase you are still not done. You have a new world to explore and make continuously improve that application. The investments in data warehousing projects are always shared between the actual delivery and research. With the successful completion of the implementation phase, you should research what other systems can benefit from it and which other systems can be integrated so that you get the best value and results. This keeps on going, both from the point of view of improvement of the existing phase and of initiating new phases.

26

THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE:A 2009 Gartner paper predicted these developments in the business intelligence market.

Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.

By 2012, business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for business intelligence.

By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service as a standard component of their business intelligence portfolio.

In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with business intelligence platform capabilities.

By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups.

27

CONCLUSION:Business intelligence play an increasingly critical role in tomorrows ever faster, ever more global, every more competitive business environment. To meet those needs, future BI systems must be real-time/near-real-time, proactive and pervasive. Users are increasingly demanding those capabilities and software vendors have begun to respond. We see a bright future emerging for business intelligence. Business Intelligence will be real-time or near real-time BI systems will be the future standard. It will be the one of the potential solution is to bypass the data warehouse. Tomorrows BI systems will be pervasive and proactive.

28

REFERENCES:

1. www.google.com 2. www.wikipedia.com 3. Business Intelligence Web Service white paper, 2003, Business Objects Corp.

29